While looking around…

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004 at
6:24 pm

While looking around…
While looking around at Dean’s World, I noticed this interesting bit of poll data. Regular readers may know that I’m not a big fan of polling data (especially reported as news) because of the skewed questions, or the skewed headlines sitting over data that doesn’t support that headline. And this information actually supports that conviction.

Based on mainstream media reports, is support for the Iraq war increasing or decreasing? If you say “decreasing”, you’d be wrong, but I couldn’t blame you. As Dean says:

The detractors who want us to pull out and go home like to point to data showing that nearly half of all Americans people disapprove of the way we’re handling the war effort. However, hidden within those statistics are those who disapprove because they simply think we aren’t fighting hard enough, aren’t committing more troops, aren’t being more tough with the insurgents. Factor that in, and those who say they “disapprove” simply because they want us to pull out are not even close to a majority.

(Did I mention I don’t like polls?)

The Gallup organization says it this way:

Despite the rising death toll of American fighting men and women in Iraq and continued news coverage of insurrection and anger against Americans in that country, a majority of Americans remain convinced that U.S. involvement in Iraq has been worth it so far, and that sending troops there was not a mistake. And, while a majority of Americans believe that U.S. troop levels in Iraq should either be kept the same or reduced, the percentage who feel that more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq has increased significantly over the last two weeks.

And there’s a lot more on their site showing that support for the war, and support for intensifying our effort to meet the resistance from insurgents and foreign fighters (i.e. from Iran & Syria) is quite strong. But you don’t hear that from the mainstream media (unless the poll numbers begin to reflect their general desire to portray Iraq as a “quagmire).